It’s an exciting time to be a patient advocate, to be in consumer health informatics and to be at the Veterans Administration. VA OpenNotes and an expanded Blue Button are coming soon to a VA near you! The health record access for patients and caregivers will be unparalleled. And potentially game-changing for healthcare teams and for health care…

The VA eHealth University, also known as VeHU, had me come to their studio in Orlando, FL, and to do a live remote session all about it. It’s also ‘on-demand’, although one has to register with the VeHU site. There’s lots of other sessions available to view as well, including one from October of this year by ePatient Dave.

My primary focus was to provide information about the Blue Button, talk about the additional data that will soon become available — clinic notes, discharge notes, and pretty much all test and imaging results — anticipated for early 2013.

I also give my ‘Top Five’ reasons for enabling this degree of health information access:

1. Technology changes patients’ lives and role in care.
2. Shared records: an idea whose time has come.
3. The evidence is in: benefits are high and risks low.
4. Veterans Voices: it’s what they want.
5. It’s time to re-design our work.

Thanks to Becky Monroe, VeHU director, and all the wonderful staff and folks at Image who do such a fantastic job.
Also indebted to @HenryWei, Presidential Fellow working with VA’s national Blue Button driver, Peter Levin (@pllevin). Henry planned to co-present with me at VeHU but he had a last-minute trip to D.C. Several of his slides on #BlueButton are in the deck.

I look forward to posting more information about this exciting development. Here’s the VeHU slides posted to slide share.